challenge.
The youths in Sunderland (UK) do not feel like they are able to make an impact in shaping their community. We wanted to explore how we can give the youth a voice through the use of technology.
outcome.
We used co-design to discover, understand and empathize with the users on a deeper level and provided our sponsor with suggestions on how to move the project forward in this direction to explore the role of technology in the youth's lives to empower them to shape their community. my role.
Designing and conducting co-design workshops - Data analyzing reflection.
The biggest takeaway from this project is learning how to adapt different methodologies to fit the context and purpose of my goals. In this project, I was able to use co-design to accomplish sense-making in different ways. For us, it was making sense of the current state of the project. For our sponsor, Sean, it making sense of and putting a new perspective onto the research that he has already done. For the local youth, it allowed them to reflect and making sense of who they are and their role in their community. |
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Getting the Context.
We framed the project based on previous research that has been done with the Youth Council in Sunderland in order to understand the context and target audience we will be working with. Through framing the project, we were able to identify meaningful ways to impact in this project. 
Activity to promote the discussion and reflection of the role of technology in their (the youth) lives
Identify Key Problem Areas.
We identified key barriers to creating change for the youth council through analyzing the research.
Scoping Down.
We narrowed down our goals using a word cloud to create a core statement to helps us keep focus on the values/aspects of the project we especially wanted to focus on. Core Statement:
Spark proactive change through reflective community practices. Sense Making.
We designed and conducted a co-design workshop with the goal to expedite our understanding of the Sunderland community and youth through the experiences of our sponsor.
Ideation.
Building on the insights of the co-design workshop, we ideated alongside with applications with similar functions to what we are hoping to make. 
We explored many applications and platforms during this stage but there were four that we found most useful for us were Gabber, Tinder, Social Media Integration (Snapchat, Pokemon Go), and App Movement.
We created designs of the an application that will allow community members to collect data, propose campaigns and take action on them as a community with the inspiration from the listed applications.
As a result of ideation, we reflected and realized that we got side tracked from our original goal and our users. We re-aligned ourselves and decided to narrow down our scope more to consider the specific needs of the youth rather than the community as a whole.
We decided to take a more participatory approached by designing and conducting a co-design workshop to get an understanding of the place technology has in the city and how it can help with taking social action in the perspective of Sunderland's youth.
Intervention Ideation - We revealed the youth's value and thought process through an ideation activity to see how the see they can take action on these changes and presented on them.
We provided our sponsor with potential directions and considerations for moving his project forward based on our understanding of the context and users.
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This concludes my team's work on this project. From there, we gave suggestions to our sponsor on how he can continue his project using UX approaches such as using a more participatory design approach, continue having workshops to introduce and explore the role of technology in the youth's live as well as in-house technology available for the youth council to consider future possibilities on how to approach the area of focus.
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